The Heart 3, KMUD, 2013

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Download link for the audio file: http://www.toxinless.com/kmud-130719-heart-3.mp3

Some small passages in the transcript have been modified for better comprehension.


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burtlancast

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Raymond Peat, Ph.D.

The heart 3


KMUD The herb doctors, 2013-07-19​


(transcribed and verified by Burtlancast)

HD: Andrew Murray (Herb Doctor)
RP: Ray Peat


HD: This month’s continuing subject is heart and associated hormones. We will also talk about Dr Peat’s latest article titled “Cataracts, aging, degeneration, swelling, etc…”. This discussion has evolved into other subjects; edema and wetness of the tissues (as opposed to dryness) - Ray mentions that when tumors arise, they are generally solid, yet have a higher than average water content - , eye changes like age-related macular degeneration, and particularly glaucoma, also have very high water concentrations. And let’s remember that estrogen is devastating for women; it’s only real function is implantation of the fertilized ovum. Outside of that, it wreaks havoc in the female (and male) body, and causes chronic inflammation the further one ages. We will also talk about estrogen and HRT (hormone replacement therapy).
Dr Peat, for those who’ve never heard of you, could you once again outline your academic background?


RP: Several years after I got my masters degree in the humanities area, I went back to graduate school in 1968, studied biology and biochemistry for a PHD, in 1972.

HD: Carrying on from the last 2 shows, where we talked about interwoven subjects like the heart, estrogen and his damaging effects; I want to ask you what do you know about the negative impact of environmental estrogen (like BPA and other plastics with hormone mimicking effects)?

RP: When the organism is exposed at a very early stage, such as during gestation, or infancy, the signals for development are changed. The reproductive system is especially changed. But besides modifying the individual by giving it false signals, the DNA is altered slightly by attaching metals groups to it, as part of that misguided development. And that means that the ability to express enzymes for the rest of its life will be influenced, unless it can somehow remove those metal groups. But, typically, they will last for 3 or 4 generations, even without further change. So, the changes that happen to one individual can be passed on for generations, altering the fertility for example, until it tends to cause the species to just disappear.

HD: What’s your opinion on the pollution from environmental estrogenic-like molecules?

RP: What they know about certain areas, the Columbia river, and the ocean off the mouth of Columbia, for example, they are seeing lots of fish, simpler water organisms, even mammals, that are sexually malformed and developing tumors. And in Florida, there have been a lot of stories about the swamp animals that are becoming sterile, changing genders, and so on. So, I think the news reported about human health isn’t being up to date, or honestly reported, because I think what we see in the wild animals is undoubtedly affecting humans to a great degree too.

HD: Do you think this could be so widespread, and so endemic that it’s almost impossible for anyone to put a lid on it, and that’s why it isn’t being exposed as much as it should be?

RP: Yea. Because of the influence of the estrogen industry, there’s a terrific reluctance to admit that estrogen has these toxic effects, even though it’s been known for a hundred years. But it’s only in the last 10-15 years that people have really been researching in an organized way influences such as these environmental plastics, chemicals, and so on. And the influence of the estrogen industry is simply going to blame any effects they see on such things as diet, smoking too much, bad ways of living, and so on.

HD: Yea. Rather than the root cause. Let’s hope they will soon be printing articles about the bad effects of estrogen in the environment the same way they recently did for polyunsaturated fats. In your opinion, what’s the relationship between estrogen and heart failure and cardiac death?

RP: Despite 40 years at least of propaganda trying to sell estrogen to men to prevent heart attacks, for example, *chuckles* they’ve found that they died faster when they took estrogen. But they keep coming back trying to sell estrogen as a heart protective hormone. And the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) somewhat set that back by showing that the use of estrogen replacement therapy for menopause increased the number of heart attacks, as well as cancer and dementia. But despite that, they’re still hoping to bring back their sales to the 2002 level, where they dropped off so sharply. Just in the last day or two, an article appeared from Yale medical school, doing what they call a meta analysis, meaning picking up some articles from funky medical magazines and analyzing them, where the type of results, basically, is what they want. Until the Women’s Health Initiative, the medical journals, for 20 or 30 years, were just swamped with the heart protective benefits, and the brain anti-Alzheimer effects, and even the anti-cancer effects of estrogen. And despite the Women’s Health Initiative, these people are now looking back to their journals, and drawing out of them the kind of information they want. And these so called studies published by the Yale people claims that tens of thousands of women are dying unnecessarily by refusing to take their estrogen treatment for menopause.

HD: *chuckles* No way. Oh my Goodness. When exactly the opposite is true: they probably have a greater chance of living without it.

RP: Yea. And hearing it from Yale, it reminds me, about 40 years ago, there was a daytime television program in which Barbara Seaman debated a Yale professor of medicine, I suspect it’s the same one that answered this recent study. And she made him look like a complete ignoramus, because she knew the facts and he was just quoting the medical doctrine. I suspect that Yale is now having its revenge, because Barbara Seaman is dead.

HD: You’ve mentioned that varicose veins were a visible sign of a lowered ratio of progesterone (the protective hormone) to estrogen.

RP: Although estrogen is a cell excitant, in the process of stimulating one kind of cell activity, it tends to make it retain water: the individual cell stays excited too long. In the process of being excited, the cell admits water. And it has to relax a certain length of time to expel the water. And so, under the influence of too much, unopposed estrogen, cells tend to get more and more waterlogged. And even though they’re excited, they progressively lose the ability to contract fully, because in contracting, the protein mechanism has to be interacting with itself, rather than pushing against a swollen amount of water. And that means that in a muscle such as the wall of a vein under the influence of high estrogen and low progesterone, testosterone, and so on, the wall of the vein becomes waterlogged and can’t contract periodically to maintain its tone. And the same thing happens in nerves, heart muscle, everywhere in the body that estrogen is able to have its influence. And in these estrogen dominated cells, the ability to contract becomes progressively weaker. Albert Szent-Györgyi demonstrated the effect of estrogen and progesterone on heart muscle over 50 years ago, and showed that under the influence of progesterone, if you stimulate the heart at an increasing frequency, each stroke becomes stronger, so it’s an efficient way to respond to frequent stimulation. It relaxes in between, gathers it’s [equipment] toegether and then has a bigger contraction under the influence of progesterone. But if it’s influenced or dominated by estrogen, it’s unable to accumulate the information that the stimulation is increasing in frequency. So, the estrogenized heart will respond to the fast stimulation by just more of the same weak little contraction. That’s basically how a failing heart behaves.

HD: So, that’s the typical picture of a gradually aging, failing heart : the excitatory stage is too long, and it’s not allowed to relax/repolarize and remove the water. And it gradually gets weaker and more feeble. You’ve mentioned that progesterone and testosterone will oppose the action of estrogen : would they be useful in other pathologies caused by estrogen dominance ?

RP: That is now being recognized that testosterone has an anti-cancer value as well. Just recently, another study came out showing that a testosterone deficiency is a strong predisposer to prostate cancer.

HD: In the past, you’ve always mentioned non stressful exercise as the best form of exercise ;you don’t advocate aerobic gymnasium type of efforts, getting your heart rate up to 160 and causing rapid breathing ; you want weight bearing exercise that doesn’t make you breathless. You say that your prefered kind of exercise increases your ability to produce muscle, and it’s the muscle which helps you stabilize your weight. And through the action of thyroid, the muscle enables you to metabolize things more efficiently, contrary to fat tissue.

RP: The muscle also metabolizes the steroid hormones. And with exercise, it can actually secrete testosterone. But in the resting, idle or stressed muscle, without adequate stimulation from good food and thyroid, muscles produce a lot of estrogen. In one study, they were using the blood draining from a monkey’s arm, as a control comparaison for the blood coming out of the ovary. They found that the monkey’s arm was producing as much estrogen as it’s ovary. And that probably isn’t a good representative of the average person, because the monkey was anesthetized, so under the influence of stress and chemicals. But basically, any stressed tissue is going to tend to produce estrogen. But a well exercised, strong muscle begins producing testosterone and stops producing estrogen.

HD: So, muscles in their own right can secrete testosterone ?

RP: Yes.

HD: I was under the impression that in the male, the main site of testosterone production was the testes. Does any other tissue secrete it ?

RP: Yea. I think the skin is known to produce testosterone, among other steroid hormones.It might be the body’s biggest endocrine synthetic factory.

HD: Also, the skin is the body’s largest organ. You’ve mentioned a previous study where higher cholesterol values were associated with a better outcome for heart failure.

RP: Yea. And that, pretty much, has been generalized to other muscles [than the heart]. Everyone is hearing the bad news about the anti-cholesterol drugs that cause muscle breakdown. Sometimes, the muscle breaks down so completely that the proteins leaking from the broken down muscle poisons the kidneys and can even kill the person. That’s because the cholesterol is a stabilizing factor for the skeletal muscles. And if you stop cholesterol synthesis, the muscles are very susceptible to damage. And those same processes are known to occur simultaneously in the heart muscle. They always assume that the leakage of these proteins that can damage the kidneys are coming from the skeletal muscles. But the heart, under those chemicals, is known to leak the same proteins.

HD: Interesting. In your previous newsletters, you’ve mentionned the link between hypoxia and cancer.

RP: Yea. The thing that’s in the research a lot lately is the hypoxia inducible factor, which is a protein that shows up…first they were seeing it wherever they cut off the oxygen supply. But that same protein can really be induced by cutting off the glucose supply too. So it really should be called the energy deprivation protein. They call it by its name; its initials are HIF: hypoxia inducible factor.

HD: It’s related more to sugar/energy deprivation?

RP: Yea. Energy deprivation. And that has been studied primarily in relation to cancer, and finding ways to block that protein production. But it turns out that just getting enough glucose and oxygen delivered to the tissues is a very simple way to inhibit that protein. HIF turns on all of the bad processes (heme oxygenase with carbon monoxide production, nitric oxide synthase, lactic acid production, prostaglandin production) causing inflammation, activating aromatase, and so on. And then, lactic acid in turn activates the HIF hypoxia factor. So, once it gets started, the inflammation tends to promote more inflammation and hypoxia.

HD: Would a higher carbon dioxide blood concentration interact with this HIF factor?

RP: If you think of the hypoxia as turning on lactic acid, which then turns on all of these other inflammatory signals, then you see that carbon dioxide turns off the production of lactic acid. Simply the ability to turn off lactic acid production is one of the basic protective features of carbon dioxide.

HD: Right. So, it’s the association between carbon dioxide and lactic acid which is the important thing. Next to the following subject, about which you will soon write a newsletter: your research shows that the wetness (as opposed to the dryness) in the eye associated with cataracts is the same kind of wetness that’s found in tumors, and in the heart during heart failure, and also in the brain during brain disease.

RP: Yea. The failing heart becomes hardened, even calcified; tumors are stiffer than healthy tissue. And even with age, in a very serious dementia, the brain can become sort of rubbery with so many connective tissue cells. And so, despite the fact that the tissue is becoming firmer, these sick degenerative states actually contain more water. So that if you dry a piece of the organ, it loses much more weight than a healthy organ would, in relation to the given amount of nucleic acids and proteins and so on. These degenerative tissues have a very high percentage of water. But besides the actual percentage of water, the water changes states and becomes relatively more like free, bulk water. It can be frozen. But the healthy cell is functioning somewhat as an antifreeze, binding the water, so it isn’t as free to move out of the cell, or to be frozen, or otherwise subject to influence.

HD: To rephrase, you’re saying the water found in these tissues during this type of pathologies isn’t electrically the same as regular water?

RP: If you have a lens that has cataracts in it, it has a much higher percentage of water per protein molecules. And if you freeze that, it will crystallize easier than a healthy lens. And this can be studied with an MRI machine, because you can very clearly see the difference between the water that’s bound firmly to the cell (in the way it should be), or the water that’s just sitting there as excess useless water plugging up the cell function.

HD: A caller wants to know if black cohosh was effective for menopause. Which is a bit of a convoluted question, because research from Europe shows it acts as an estrogen stimulant. Black cohosh is typically used in the literature for menopause, decreasing night sweats, acting as an estrogen replacement ; so I was always very cautious about it.

RP: I’ve heard some ideas that it was an anti prolactin factor; I don’t know what the current state of that idea is.

HD: And the caller wanted to know too what the best herb for menopause is. Well, the problem in menopause is excess estrogen, and Ray has advised to take pregnenolone and progesterone to counter this excess estrogen.

RP: And usually thyroid. Cholesterol tends to rise at menopause. And if thyroid is adequate, that will keep turning the cholesterol into more of the pregnenolone and progesterone to protect against estrogen.

Caller: When a tissue is experiencing edema, its water is considered minimally structured?
And is it true we produce our own water at times? How structured is it? Is the water in orange juice or milk considered optimally structured?


RP: My article on the polywater question talks about some of the ranges of influence; how far certain surfaces can influence this structure, such as in clay. The water in ordinary clay is structured differently from bulk water. But there’s also a question of how long the influence of that surface can last. Gerard Pollack, at the University of Washington, has some videos on the internet where you can see his demonstrations of some of the odd behavior of water, even in a fairly bulk situation. But ordinarily, it doesn’t make any difference, whether you drink water that has been boiled or frozen recently. It’s mostly a matter of degassing that they said behave differently according to its recent history. It’s safe to drink tea or coffee water that has been boiled. But what matters is the state of the water inside the cell. And that’s governed by the energy of the metabolism, and the ratio of things like carbon dioxide to lactic acid. In other hard tissues, collagen is the main protein that gives its stiffness. But in the lens, the main protein is called crystallin. And it happens that crystallin is very well ordered with reference both to the structure of water and to the wavelength of visible light. So that the water surrounding these proteins in the lens is so well ordered that it doesn’t interfere with, or reflect, or absorb the light passing through it. It’s an essential protein for maintaining the transparency of the lens. And this protein, if you compare it to collagen, or albumin, or other common proteins, can bind very firmly, about twice as much water as other proteins, and hold it under its influence. So, really, in the normal state, the water of the lens and the protein are in a tight system. But when the energy processes fail, and you absorb influences such as estrogen, polyunsaturated fats, lactic acid, various toxins, then the energy is unable to repair the system, and the water gets out of control of these proteins, and starts becoming ordinary bulk water that interferes with the passage of light, and lets junk accumulate, such as broken down fragments of polyunsaturated fats. Acrolein, for example, breaking down from the N-3 proteins is a major factor in cataract formation.
And the water that has been filtered through an orange tree, or a [towel], is at least very purified, compared to how water gets out of our plumbing.

HD: I know you’re against drinking plain water. You would rather have people get their water from nutritional foods.

RP: Yea. And we do make quite a bit of water metabolically; when we eat carbohydrates, in particular, some of the oxygen that we are using to produce energy becomes water. And the metabolic water is just intermixing with the water that we get from the food itself. But the nature of the oxygens contained in carbohydrates can influence [too] the metabolism of the cell. The hydrogens, as well as the oxygens, are a mixture of isotopes of different weight. In everything that we eat, or consist of, we have a mixture of these different weight isotopes. And heavy water (deuterium oxide) slows down our metabolism. And because the rainfall is separating the heavy water from the light water, there’s a slight difference in the water that we get from tropical sugars versus beef sugars that’s grown up in a high altitude. So, depending on where the fruit grows, there is a slight difference in the quality of the water.

Caller: So you’re saying that the water in the lens of the eye is structured so that it’s almost crystalline? Water is structuring the different substances it’s inter-mingling with?

RP: Well, the proteins structure the water, and then the water admits things selectively.

Caller: I take 100mg of metoprolol, a cholesterol lowering drug, for 5 years now [actually, the caller is mistaken: metoprolol is a selective beta blocker medication, also called Lopressor]. I also take isosorbide (time-released nitroglycerine) for my heart. I’ve had 7 heart attacks in the past 9 years. Should I be concerned about taking so much metoprolol?

RP: The only safe way I know to lower cholesterol chronically is by increasing thyroid function. In 1936 or 1937, people demonstrated that if you remove a person’s thyroid gland, their cholesterol level goes up as a mere image of their oxygen consumption going down. When you give them a thyroid supplement, the cholesterol will fall as the oxygen consumption increases. [And since] the cholesterol is normally destined to turn into DHEA, progesterone, testosterone, and so on, if you push down the availability of cholesterol by any mechanism, you’re going to tend to deprive the body of these steroids that it should be forming, [irrespective of the other side effects of the drug]. Sadly, doctors prefer to prescribe drugs with many toxic side effects.

HD: For reminders, we’re covering Ray’s latest work on the similarities between the structural components of cataracts, macular degeneration, tumors and heart failure.
A caller asks if it matters if one takes T4 or T3.


RP: The study that led to the substitution of thyroxine (T4) for the natural combination T3 and T4 was a test on male medical students in their early 20’s. And being male, they didn’t have the problems that typically females have (about 5 or 10 times the incidence of thyroid problems). So, they tested thyroxin on a population that was extremely inappropriate for testing the thyroid product. And they said it works just like natural thyroid. Since it was a commercial proprietary material, they preferred it to the natural product. But after about 10-15 years, the actual active hormone T3 was identified and studied. And it was found that this is what women lack typically, causing them to have 5 or 10 times the thyroid problems that men do. Because estrogen interferes with the gland’s secretion of both T4 and T3. But it especially interferes with the liver’s ability to convert thyroxine to the active hormone T3. So, many women actually get worse symptoms when they take thyroxine, because it suppresses the little bit of T3 that their thyroid gland is producing, yet doesn’t add to the amount of T3 that should be produced by the liver.
Some of the typically female problems, such as endometriosis are just amazingly responsive to the proper thyroid supplementation. Because once the thyroid goes down, then estrogen goes up. And since the estrogen blocks thyroid action, it becomes a vicious circle.

HD: A caller asks what are the effects of cannabinoids on cancer.

RP: I think people are still exploring that. There are some suspicions that it might actually slow cancer growth. Others worry that it might make it worse. But mostly it’s used to prevent the stress symptoms, and for that it’s effective.

HD: Cannabis and Hops both belong to the Cannabaceae family, and Hops expresses a lot of pro-estrogenic compounds, which is why the Hop pickers, during Hop picking in august in England would lose their periods, such is it’s powerful effect on the hormone system.

RP: Hops is a very powerful estrogen.

HD: Is there any similarity between Hops and cannabis, given they are in the same family?

RP: I’m sure there’s a lot of overlap. Almost every plant has some estrogenic or anti-estrogenic material. But mostly, they’re estrogenic, because it’s a defensive material, that for example, act like a birth control pill for predators. The known effects of heavy marijuana smoking are definitely estrogenic. But some of that could just be that any kind of smoke is estrogenic.

[PS: Wikipedia disagrees : the Cannabaceae family includes 170 species grouped in 11 genera, of which the genera Cannabis (hemp, marijuana) and Humulus (hops). Other than a shared evolutionary origin , members of the family have few common characteristics; some are trees (e.g. Celtis), others are herbaceous plants (e.g. Cannabis).]

HD: Smokers have abundant carbon monoxide in their blood. But they also have pretty high carbon dioxide, which you say is a good thing. How dangerous is smoking?

RP: The carbon monoxide can accumulate and have some chronic, harmful effects such as on the liver function. But I think the real danger of smoke is the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which are inflammatory, estrogenic, and carcinogenic. Just anything you burn is gonna produce some of those. And then, any smoke of a plant material is gonna produce some dioxin-type material.

HD: Thank you for your time, Dr Peat.

RP: Thank you.
 

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